U-M names
director and faculty for Life Sciences
Institute

By Karl Leif Bates / Life
Sciences Institute

President Mary Sue Coleman has named
cell biologist Alan R. Saltiel to be the
director of the Life Sciences Institute.
She also has announced that six prominent
U-M scientists have agreed to join the
institute as its “charter faculty."

Alan Saltiel (Photo
by Marcia Ledford, U-M Photo Services)

“Dr. Saltiel is an internationally
recognized authority on diabetes, obesity
and cellular signaling, and he has experience
leading multidisciplinary research teams
in the private sector,” Coleman
says. “With Alan, we’ve assembled
a charter faculty of six creative, thoughtful
scientists who are among the very best.”

“By seeding the institute with
these talented faculty from departments
across the University, the institute will
build upon our strength and ensure that
the institute and the rest of the campus
benefit in the strongest possible way
from each other,” Interim Provost
Paul Courant says.

The $100 million, 240,000-square-foot
Life Sciences Institute, set to open in
fall 2003, is built around a “lab
without walls” concept in which
researchers from a variety of disciplines
will interact and collaborate in shared
spaces.

It is considered a new way of doing science
at Michigan--one that is needed to explore
the difficult and interrelated scientific
questions of understanding life at the
level of cells and individual molecules.
It will house 20 to 30 faculty and their
research teams, totaling about 350 people.
The charter faculty will move their labs
to the institute, but will retain tenured
appointments in their respective academic
departments.

Saltiel replaces Jack E. Dixon, a biochemist
who announced in July that he will be
leaving U-M to become dean of scientific
affairs at the University of California,
San Diego. Saltiel served as associate
director of the institute before being
named to replace Dixon.

The creation of a high-powered core of
charter faculty will accelerate LSI’s
recruitment efforts. The charter group
will apply their experience and vision
“to make this a place people want
to work,” biochemist Rowena Matthews
says.
The LSI will target three overlapping
areas of the vast, post-genomic scientific
revolution:

Genetics, genomics
and proteomics: Examining the functions
and expression patterns of genes and developing
nanoscale tools to study gene and protein
properties; understanding the molecular
basis of disease susceptibility.

Molecular and cellular
biology: Investigating the networked
organization of genes and proteins in
a cell, and determining the ways in which
cells sense and adapt to stimuli.

By following the science where it leads,
rather than being circumscribed by the
definition of a particular discipline,
institute scientists are going to find
some unexpected discoveries where their
work intersects. For example, geneticist
David Ginsburg’s work on the specifics
of the blood-clotting mechanism in a particular
kind of hemophilia has led to some general
understanding of how the cell moves proteins
around within its machinery. “Studying
this obscure human disease, we got a very
fundamental insight into how the cell
works,” Ginsburg says. “Studying
human disease can lead to some basic biological
insights.”

Conversely, studying a biologically basic
model organism like yeast can lead to
some insights into human health, cell
biologist Daniel Klionsky says. The mechanism
used by yeast to recycle its own contents
during a period of starvation happens
to be a good model for understanding the
molecular defects that may cause human
cells to become cancerous, or undergo
processes that lead to neurodegenerative
disease and some kinds of heart disease,
Klionsky says. “We’d like
to have a simple living system to look
at this in detail.”
The research paths of the charter faculty,
and the additional two dozen colleagues
they will recruit, should intersect and
merge in places over the normal course
of research at the institute. At the center
of the institute’s three fields
lies a deeper understanding of life at
the cellular level, Saltiel says. “It’s
all of these fields working together that
will advance the life sciences into the
next level of sophistication,” he
says.